Folly

Is the key theme in the Furioso, typical of early XVI century European culture, as testified to by the famous Moriae encomium by Erasmus from Rotterdam, and which culminated in Don Quijote de la Mancha by Cervantes. In Ariosto the ‘folly’ of the wise knight par excellence, Orlando, is what typifies this romance: the poet takes up Boiardo’s idea, relative to the paladin’s love, dilating it and carrying it to its extreme consequences. The theme of ‘folly’ is announced in the second stanza of the first canto in the Furioso: ‘Dirò d’Orlando in un medesmo tratto / cosa non detta in prosa mai né in rima: / che per amor venne in furore e matto, / d’uom che sì saggio era stimato prima’. ‘Folly’ is intimately linked to love, as a symbol of structural ambiguity and misunderstanding, of risk and incumbent menace. The part of the Furioso in which Orlando’s folly becomes manifest is that relative to cantos XXIII-XXIV. Orlando goes mad when he reads the love messages, engraved on the bark of a tree,  which Angelica and Medoro exchange. Stricken with grief by this bitter discovery, the paladin errs in desperation, following an oscillating movement (‘Di qua, di là, di su, di giù discorre, XXIV, 14,1). Ariosto identifies himself with Orlando and, like his character, is aware that he moves without a specific goal. The poet joins a leaves a path, abandons and then again takes up an issue, makes of narrative digression a dimension of escape from reality, and hence of ‘folly’. The ‘folly’ which Ariosto talks of needs to be understood in terms of metaphor as the other side of a collective folly based on the negation of truth, pretence and the belief that one possesses  truth and certainties. In the Furioso the sanity lost by Orlando is then recovered in canto XXXIV by Astolfo who, going up to the moon on the back of the hippogryph, recovers it in the great valley of the things lost by men. The recovery of sanity and the remission of folly make Ariosto’s treatment of this subject less unsettling than, for example,  Torquato Tasso’s ‘true’ folly.